A Visit to Don Otavio (19 page)

T
HE REST OF THE FAMILY had been more slow to see the joke, and dinner that night was still glum.

‘Am I to understand,’ said E when we were alone, ‘that this eminent lay-nun is a doublecrosser?’

‘No, no, no,’ said Anthony; ‘it’s all out now. Luís got the dough out of the pious aunt two months ago for some crackpot scheme of his. It went bust even before Luís had time to get in.’

‘I daresay an experience unique in his career,’ said E.

‘So Luís hung on to the money. The old girl is furious. She made a screaming row with her confessor. You see the dope had told her to put Luís on his feet for the sake of his nine children.’

‘What are they going to do about it now?’

‘The pious aunt wants her money back. Otavio brought a letter telling Luís. Some letter. The others are pretending they know nothing about it. They’re going to offer Luís a thousand pesos to stay out. They’re that relieved it wasn’t some tycoon who wanted to do them out of the whole place, they’re going to play it soft. What beats me is what Doña Victoria was so scared about. Luís is asking five thousand.
He
hasn’t seen the letter yet. They think they can settle for two. Otavio has got them on him. From the pious aunt.’

‘Ready money cannot be as tight in Mexico as Mr Middleton would have us believe,’ said E.

It was settled, thanks to Don Otavio’s firmness, for fifteen hundred.

‘Who is going to get the extra five?’ said E and I at once.

‘Otavio is returning them to the pious aunt. She always tips him.’

Everybody appeared in high spirits and agreements were signed that morning with a flourish. Don Jaime brought off a small coup of his own. He had meant to ask for a modest share in the profits in return for an investment of five thousand pesos, but in view of the reception given to Don Luís’s offer had decided to desist. He now took advantage of the reversal of mood to ask for this profit
without
an offer of capital and so impressed Don Enriquez and Otavio by his loyalty in not springing cash on them that they consented at once.

Mrs Rawlston came to lunch. She seemed upset about something. ‘You all set now to rook each other and the public?’ she addressed the company.

‘Mrs Rawlston is always herself,’ said Doña Victoria.

‘Is this not a pretty dress?’ said Don Otavio.

‘That’s right, Victoria,’ said Mrs Rawlston; ‘put every cent you’ve got on your back.’

‘Mrs A, you a Democrat?’ she asked E over the rice.

‘We are all
so
fond of Doña E,’ said Don Otavio.

‘I am,’ said E. ‘My father voted for Woodrow Wilson twice; I cast my first vote for James Cox against the unfortunate Harding; I voted for John W. Davis against Coolidge …’

‘
Against
an incoming President?’ said Don Luís.

‘That’s kind of a Republican family you married into,’ said Mrs Rawlston.

‘Personally, Mrs Rawlston, I am a strong Roosevelt woman.’

‘We have had better, and we have had worse. I haven’t been home since the Arthur Administration. 1884. Well, have you heard the news? Mr Middleton’s had a pair of blacks to his house. Should have thought Mr Middleton knew better. Richard Middleton a nigger-lover! Wouldn’t have believed it. I sat down straight away and wrote to tell him what I think of him. Blacks in his house! Sitting down to tea with them, and poor Blanche pouring it out.’

‘You cannot mean the two gentlemen from Bombay, Mrs Rawlston? They are distinguished plant psychologists, and I believe high-caste Hindus.’

‘They’re black for all that, ain’t they? I saw them. Thought I heard you say you were a Democrat, Mrs A?

‘Now what are you all celebrating about?’ She turned to Don Enriquez. ‘How soon are you going to open this hotel?’

‘Very soon. Everything has been arranged.’

‘Have you got the road? Have you got a manager? Got a cook that can stay sober for two Sundays on end? Got any customers?’

‘There are still a few details. We only settled the most important.’

‘Got any linen? What about knives and forks? And china? Any of you thought of that? Thought of anything beside yourselves? Luís gave you all a fine scare, didn’t you, Luís? Who did you think the money came from?’

‘Some combine from the North,’ said Don Jaime.

‘Bet you all thought it was Felipe. I can see you did. Didn’t
you
, Concepción? Your brother never knew what to do with his money, and they say he’s got a grudge against you, Enriquez.’

There was no silence: speech flowed promptly from all sides almost before Mrs Rawlston had finished and I did not allow Anthony to catch my eye.

Some of Mrs Rawlston’s details came up that evening, and came up in front of us.

‘We shan’t have the road this year,’ said Don Enriquez. ‘It doesn’t matter: you can have the run of my boat. I shall put it in the company’s name.’

‘We shall have to buy new things,’ said Don Otavio. ‘Juan and I will make a list.’

‘It will be expensive,’ said Don Enriquez.

‘Victoria, what about Mama’s silver? And the big Sèvres?’ said Don Otavio.

‘What silver?’ said Don Enriquez.

‘The silver and china that were taken into Guadalajara when the
Carrancistas
were all over the lake,’ said Don Otavio.

‘Madre de Dios,
do we still have all that stuff in our house, Victoria?’

‘You must have seen us use it,
querido.
’

‘You would not think of putting the family plate in an hotel?’ said Don Jaime.

‘I entirely agree with Jaime,’ said Doña Victoria.

‘So do I,’ said Don Luís. ‘I know a Northern American firm that sells hotel equipment. Nice, cheap things. They are going to make me very special prices. I brought their catalogue.’

‘We will use Mama’s,’ said Don Enriquez at once. ‘Don’t look at me, Victoria; it is
my
mother’s silver. Worse things can happen. The Saints know who is eating off yours now as it was stolen in the Revolutions. By your own servants, too; or so your father told me.’

‘Very well, Enriquez. You never think of your daughter, do you?’

‘Oh my daughter, my daughter. She is a handsome girl. Who knows? Perhaps I shall marry her to some foreign fellow who doesn’t expect twelve of this and a dozen of the other. Why should I throw good silver after my daughter?’

‘Now really, Enriquez,’ said Doña Victoria.

‘These days all foreigners who aren’t heretics, are either poor or South Americans,’ said Don Jaime.

‘There were such nice Irish girls at school,’ said Doña Concepción.

‘The Irish never had anything worth having,’ said Don Enriquez.

‘A bigoted lot,’ said Don Jaime.

‘Of course, there are always the French,’ said Doña Victoria.

‘All the really good fortunes are still intact,’ said Don Jaime.

‘All Frenchmen are atheists,’ said Doña Concepción.

‘Atheism is no heresy,’ said Don Jaime.

‘It doesn’t show,’ said Don Luís.

‘Atheists are nothing but relapsed Catholics,’ said Doña Victoria.

‘Reconversion is a very wonderful opportunity, a very great grace for a wife,’ said Doña Concepción.

‘That is true,’ said Don Luís.

‘We have looked to Europe for too long,’ said Don Enriquez; ‘there are many rich Catholic families in the United States of Northern North America, are there not, Doña E?’

T
HE SANDS were running out.

On Sunday there was a party. Joaquím and Orazio and their sister arrived the night before; also four of the Jaimes’ almost grown-up children and Doña Concepción’s brother, Don Felipe, a lean, over-bred, dissolute-looking man in his forties. On the day, boatload upon boatload of men looking like Goyas and women looking like Doña Concepción disembarked at noon. Comparatively modest refreshment had been set out in the garden; more elaborate preparations were going on behind the scenes, and the band from Ajijíc, lent by Doña Anna, was hiding, silent, in the bushes. We had understood it to be an evening party. Don Otavio and Doña Concepción explained that Mexican parties always begin in the morning and in an apparently off-hand manner. You are not expected to expect your guests to like it well enough to stay. If they do, meals will appear at the proper times with apparent spontaneity. There must be a supply of drink against any length and number, but only a fraction of it suitable for a brief call visible at first. In due course, dinner for forty will be served and the guests contrive to adjust their clothes with the same air of improvisation.

‘What if the party doesn’t go?’ said Anthony.

‘That is very sad,’ said Don Otavio. ‘Then there is no music. They are told not to play.’

‘Does it happen often?’

‘It happens.’

‘Then does everybody go home?’

‘Oh no. That would not be polite.’

‘So they stay for lunch and tea and dinner all the same?’

‘They stay. But it is not the same.’

‘It is not the same at all,’ said Doña Concepción.

The men sat in the shade and smoked; the women chattered all over the house and lawn. They talked to E and me about their schools; Roehampton and the various branches of the Sacred Heart. E had been to one of them, greatly embarrassing the history class, and I had been to the Ursulines, so we were able to hold our own.

‘Doña E, how is it possible that poor Antonio is heretical when you are not?’ said Doña Concepción.

‘Well, his grandfather came from the South, and mine from Ireland,’ said E.

‘Yes, yes. But it must be so dreadful for you to have a Protestant in the family. Do you try to convert him?’

‘No,’ said E.

‘
Such
a pity,’ said Doña Victoria.

Huge amounts of food and case upon case of spirits were consumed, but no one was in the least the worse for liquor. At four, the band began to play and kept it up till midnight. After dinner there was dancing. The married women danced, the young girls did not. Anthony was gently refused by Don Enriquez’ daughter, ‘You must wait until I am
casada
, Don Antonio – housed.’

The guests went after their full span but at what was still a decorous hour, and the next morning the three brothers left San Pedro. The women stayed on and entered a five days’ Retreat for a Special Intention, the success of the hotel. The Sixteenth of September was celebrated along the lake with much alcohol, bloodshed and fireworks in full sunlight. Waves of newly white-collared Indios arrived at Chapala by motor-bus. Nationalism and rowdy xenophobia were rampant. The lanes echoed with drunken groans and screams of
Viva Mexico
. For a week, children danced nightly around Mr Middleton’s bungalow shouting
GRINGO
, the opprobrious term for Americans. At Jocotepec, at the culminating point of the festival, several local mules joined loudly in the
Grita de Dolores
, the ritual cry burst into by the crowds at the stroke of midnight
amidst a bedlam of bell-ringing and firing off of fire-arms; the unfortunate animals were arrested for patriotic blasphemy and taken off to gaol where they languished for days before their drunken owners noticed their absence and set to bail them out. Jesús had not returned.

‘He sold his mother’s cow,’ said Don Otavio, ‘so he will go to the North of North America, to Texas, to make his fortune. He has had a general disgust.’

‘What about his wife?’

‘She can marry Juan.’

‘Divorce?’

‘No, no. She and Jesús were not married enough. The Church does not like the Indios to get really married. There would be so much adultery. It would be a very great sin.’

At the end of the week Anthony left, borne off by water and motor car to Guadalajara and thence by air to the USA, and a few days later our time had come. Don Otavio embraced E; I was embraced by Guadalupe and Soledad, and we both gave a solemn promise to return at Christmas.

‘Why must you go on travels,
niña
?’ said Guadalupe. ‘It is expensive and not wise. Is it for a vow?’

‘No one goes anywhere except to Guadalajara and Mexico,’ said Don Otavio, ‘and to San José Purúa for the gout. Foreigners go to Acapulco to bathe, but it is very hot and nasty. If the hotel does well, Luís and I shall go to Juan-les-Pins. We hear it is very nice now. Oh why must you leave San Pedro?

‘No. You are very much mistaken. There is nothing to see in the Republic. Nothing. You will be very uncomfortable and not at all happy.’

O
UR FIRST DESTINATION was Mazatlán, a tropical port on the Pacific in the State of Sinaloa, a clearing house for sugar, gold and fruit, forgotten now, lagoon enclosed, idyllic. We had been charmed by a description in an old travel book, and although the place lay some six hundred kilometres off our intended route – slow progress through the Central Provinces to the Ruins in the South – we decided to go, and to spend a month at Mazatlán.

There is no road into Sinoloa from anywhere. Aeroplanes are small and few, but there is a railway. The Southern-Pacific Railway, in fact, which twice a week starts from Guadalajara, climbs down the Sierra to the West Coast and runs along the Pacific all the way to California. This is what we took.

We very nearly missed it. I was standing in a queue waiting to register a trunk. All auguries were fair. There were only half a dozen people in front of me with few encumbrances each, and there were four registration clerks scurrying about in a flurry of helpfulness. There was a full hour before even the official time of departure. Taking a train is a nervous ordeal to me: I sat on one side of the trunk trying to read a newspaper; the porter, a young man half my size, sat on the other. E had gone to the platform to find our seats. The station was squalid. Hundreds of people were sitting on the ground, wrapped in blankets or straw mats, asleep, cooking food, nursing babies.

‘Viajeros,'
said the porter.

‘Then why don't they travel?' said I. ‘It must be unusual to make camp before you have started; in peace time at least.'

‘The travellers are waiting for the trains,' said the porter.

‘Are the trains as late as that?'

‘Not the trains. The travellers.'

‘Late? They look as though they'd come very early.'

‘Yes, early. Late and early. The travellers come at all times.'

‘Don't they ever come in time for the trains?'

‘Who would know that?' said the porter.

‘Don't they find out?'

‘Why take so great a trouble? This is a nice station. All in the shade.'

Forty minutes passed and the four clerks were still attending to the first person in the queue. I got off the trunk, edged forward and peeked. The clerks were trying to put steel bands around a somewhat dishevelled bundle. The contrivance for clamping the steel bands did not seem to work. One clerk hugged the bundle in his arms, two held it laced in steel, the fourth advanced with the apparatus in the manner of a monkey imitating a dentist approaching the chair. He pounced: something snapped, steel bands writhed in the air, the bundle burst agape; then everything was dropped on the floor, comments were exchanged, the clerks rested from their labours. Then one approached the bundle and the identical process was repeated all over again. I edged back, unable to bear more.

Another twenty minutes and perseverance must have borne its fruit for the owner of the bundle strode away empty-handed, frowning at a slip of paper. The next man in line had not filled in his forms. Had no forms. He was told where to get them. He went. The clerks lolled back.

‘Why don't they go on with the next person?' said I, looking at my watch.

‘It is not his turn. It is the turn of the man who has no forms,' said the porter. ‘It would not be polite. This is a very regular, modern railway.'

The man who had no forms returned. ‘You must fill them in,' said the clerks.

‘I cannot write in forms,' said the man.

‘You must go to a scribe,' said the clerks.

There was a pause.

‘It is Sunday,' said the man.

‘You should go yesterday,' said the clerks.

‘Yesterday I had no forms,' said the man.

‘That is true,' said the clerks.

There was another pause.

‘The ticket clerk writes in forms,' said the clerks. ‘We will ask him to do it.'

‘I can take the train another day,' said the man.

‘We will ask the ticket clerk. He is very obliging.'

‘No, no. I shall take the train some other day; it is no matter.' The man asked for his crate, it was lifted on to his head and he walked away.

The next man had forms and a straw trunk, neatly strapped and padlocked. The clerks produced the coil of steel band.

‘
Not
more steel bands?' said I.

‘Steel bands for everything,' said the porter.

‘That trunk is locked.'

‘Steel bands for every piece of baggage. It is the regulation.'

‘One does see why the thieves prefer to walk off with the whole piece. Now what about that train? It is an hour past its hour.'

‘Do not preoccupy yourself with the train, Señora. The train will not go for a long little while. It never leaves without everybody. It is a very regular train.'

The clerks had lit a spirit lamp and were dropping melted lead on the recalcitrant steel bands. The lead burnt a small hole into the straw trunk. The clerks poured some water from a carafe into the hole. The owner of the trunk giggled excitedly.

I will say
Lycidas
to myself; from beginning to end, very slowly this time, before looking up, I resolved. The porter seized my hand. ‘Come,' he cried. He wrenched at the trunk. ‘Come! The train!' We ran through the gate. The train was pulling out. I was pushed on. Two carriages further up, E was being assisted down. Our hand luggage lay piled at various points of the platform. I tried to get off. The porter howled, E saw me and was pushed on again. Two strangers grasped the trunk about its middle and, running, shoved it into an open door. Bystanders picked up bags and
typewriters and flung them into passing windows. Peso notes fluttered in the wind of increasing speed.

E and I met and sat down.

‘You had the passports.'

‘
You
had the tickets.'

‘
You
had the money.'

‘I should have got out at the first stop,' said E, ‘and telegraphed the American Consulate and Don Otavio.'

‘Our
first stop
, my dear, is nine hours from here, at Tepic, in the
Terra Caliente.
Tepic, I have just learned, is a Nahoa word meaning hard stone.'

‘Don Otavio wasn't at all enthusiastic about Mazatlán,' said E; ‘frankly, S, I don't think any forgotten tropical port is worth this.'

‘Let's have lunch,' said I.

The Pullman was full of people we had not seen in markets and buses, or met at San Pedro Tlayacán. The kind of people Don Jaime described as not having worn shoes long: petty bourgeois Mexicans,
mestizos
all, the fairly recent products of the towns. The men were broadhipped, soft and sweaty; the girls pretty; the women running to fat after seventeen. Every family had brought fruit, a provision of sweets and a bottle of
tequila
. The atmosphere was polite, complacent, reserved. No passenger passed another in the corridor without exchanging the compliments of the hour. Whenever someone stumbled against our trunk (now inevitably obstructing an aisle), he would apologise for touching our property. The whole train rang with
dispénseme, con permiso, si Vd. lo permite, a sus órdenes, servidor di Ustéd
. In the section opposite to ours, sat an enormous mestiza lady with folds and folds of purple chins and skin, and her two daughters who had very bad complexions and spent their time putting powder on their faces. E, an addict of the
Bibliothèque Rose
, called them
Madame Crapaude et ses deux filles laides
. Outside, valley after valley slid by in the September sunshine: tobacco,
tequila
plantations, maize, mangoes, more maize. The afternoon wore on. E read
Persuasion
; Madame Crapaude engaged me in snatches of dull conversation; the daughters prinked. We were running through a volcanic region, unplanted, uninhabited, cleft by mounds and crevasses
the colour and texture of pumice stone. Then the scenery widened, became wholly panoramic with no foreground at all: clouds and clouds of mountain peaks and, beside the rails, a sheer drop of some thousand feet. The train slowed, dipped, and with all brakes drawn began descending at an exceedingly steep angle. We were creeping down the side of the Western Sierra Madre.

Madame Crapaude's
deux filles laides
squealed.

‘I believe this is a very great engineering feat,' said E. ‘We had the same problem in the Rocky Mountains. No rail-bed can take that kind of stress long. You remember the Colorado-Pass Rail Wreck in '39?'

On the map, Mexico looks like the headless part of a large fish, hacked across the middle. Its shape and situation are roughly that of Italy only that Mexico is about seven times as large. Like the Italian peninsula, it is attached in the north to the mass of a continent, and stretches southwards into the sea. Like Italy, it is wide across the top, then tapers down; like Italy it is flanked by two long, opposing coast-lines. Unlike the boot, it is not straight but curves around the gulf like a dolphin's back. And the peninsula is not a peninsula: the fish's tail is not washed by the sea but joined to Central America by a short, forked land-border with Guatamala and British Honduras.

Not a peninsula in fact, but in shape and feeling. It is often thought of as the bridge between the North American Continent and Central America; this, apart from the inhabitant's conviction of being part of North America, is misleading, as the concept of a bridge implies a smoothness and regularity which the land mass of Mexico lacks to a fantastic degree. Two-thirds of its length are filled by the plateau (another misleading term), and from the north this is accessible enough. It used to be said that one could drive from Texas on to Mexico in a coach-and-four: the drive-in is hundreds of miles wide, the rise from sea-level gradual. The southern exit is a different matter. It is narrower, very steep and furrowed by canyons. It has one – recent – road. And of course the plateau itself is not level, but a rugged base for other mountains. The surface of this singular tableland is slit by gorges, gashed by ravines, rent by chasms, blocked by volcanoes and crossed by expanse beyond expanse
of lateral ranges. If progress north to south is thus impeded, access from west or east is hardly possible at all as the long sides of the plateau are the two stupendous
Sierras
dropping perpendicularly into the sea and, across these, the coasts can only be reached at a few hair-raising points.

Soon darkness mercifully veiled the secrets of that descent. Nothing similar occurred to dim the sharpness of the recollections of a century of rail wrecks that issued from E's memory.

That night I lay in my bunk across from where Madame Crapaude's daughters had squeezed themselves into one upper, dozing wakefully, lucid and lonely. The train jerked, pitched, halted, in our slow advance over one of the world's most uninhabited mountain passes.
Que diable allais-je chercher dans cette galère?

We were due at Mazatlán at five o'clock; in itself a prospect not conducive to a quiet night's rest. The stops became longer. At last I decided we were going to be late, and fell asleep. I was woken by voices. Cannot get through, I heard. Line's washed away; we'll have to go back. And indeed after another wait the train began to reverse. It had become impossibly stuffy inside the bunks, so by six o'clock everybody was up and dressed, sticky and dirty with only a tepid trickle to wash under in the stinking lavatory, and ready to face the situation. No one knew what that was. Engine trouble, said some. A bridge was down. There had been floods though the rains
ought
to be over, and the line was under water. A local tribe, inimical to railways, had tampered with the ties. Meanwhile we had gone back a stretch and come to a halt in what the breaking light of day revealed to be a swamp; and further light, a supposed station.

The name RUIZ was peeling off a board nailed to a degraded hut, housing no doubt some signals and the stationmaster's family. This hut was the extent of the station buildings. There were no further huts, no platform, no facilities; no village in sight. There was no shelter of any kind. We were now across the Sierra Madre, and Ruiz would be in Nayarít, the territory of the Nayarítos, the only aborigines who managed to dawdle over their conversion to the Catholic faith from the Conquest well into the eighteenth century, and Nayarít lay in the coastal plains and therefore in the hot zone. Even at that early hour there was no need of
such geography to make it clear that this was going to be as hot a day as any of us had ever feared to live through. Mosquitoes, too, were already up and about. A number of pigs now assembled round the train, and presently boarded it, looking and begging for food. They were dripping with liquid yellow mud. Information as to the length of our sojourn at Ruiz was not unanimous. Some said six hours, some ten; some said we would leave at midday, some at nightfall. Some said next morning, others in three days. The last train from the North had been four days late. There was also the hypothesis that we would be returned to Guadalajara. None of this was improbable.

The morning got under way. We all sat. E and I consciously. It is hard on a Westerner to sit in a train that does not move. He may have a book, he may have something to talk about, he may be comfortable – we were not – and all the time he will be aware that something is missing, that something is wrong. It will jab and nibble at his nerves, scatter his concentration, tumble his equilibrium. If only the damn thing would move: the heat, the dirt, the boredom, all would be tolerable.
Oh, if only it
would move!

‘Is
nothing
being done about this?' said E, standing up.

The Mexicans munched and sipped and chattered –
seguro
, it was hot. Madame Crapaude wielded a desperate fan. They were discussing developments with detached interest. We were in touch with Guymas – by the telegraph – with Tepíc, with Guadalajara. Someone was on his way to repair what had to be repaired. Repairs were going on almost now.